I was shaping for Gary Chapman, Joey Cabell, Jock Sutherland, Reno Abellira and David Nuuhiwa.

Forget what you know about the modern World Championship Tour for a moment and picture this: an international surf contest with no bracket formats, no elimination rounds, no priority rules, and no big prize purse—just 24 surfers thrown into a single heat to scramble for scores.

To celebrate Brewer’s birthday, and to give you youngsters out there a notion of what the boardmaking guru sounded like in full cry, I offer this slightly truncated version of a 1971 interview Brewer did with Drew Kampion, who was the Dick Brewer of surf mag editors.

Paid for his boards, in fact, when other marquee shapers were groveling for the chance to hand out free sticks to the surfing elite.

The dev-shaper of the future, unlike Brewer, will never justify his spreadsheet-loaded array of digitized board files as a way to “express my level of consciousness to my fellow man. ” This is a loss.

According to the Pyongyang Times, North Korea’s tourism authorities are offering surf tours to international guests during “this present bathing season. ” The first tours ran from July 28th through August 6th.